One more addendum to the question of Freud and science. The gravest deployment of psychoanalytic theory was in psychopathology, and it’s here that I have the greatest trouble with Freud’s influence. Now, the history of the treatment of the severely mentally ill, in asylums and otherwise, has been generally dismal, and so it is hard to credit Freud with making things any worse on that front. Perhaps he even made them better, and to be sure Freud avoided the area himself, probably figuring it (correctly) to be a minefield. But as psychoanalysis grew, some of his followers were not so hesitant, and the application of psychoanalysis in psychopathology yielded some disturbing results.
There are no shortage of examples, but Oak Ridge recently came to my attention. As Jon Ronson tells it in The Psychopath Test:
Dr. Elliott Barker successfully sought permission from the Canadian government to obtain a large batch of LSD from a government-sanctioned lab, Connaught Laboratories, University of Toronto. He handpicked a group of psychopaths (“They have been selected on the basis of verbal ability and most are relatively young and intelligent offenders between seventeen and twenty-five,” he explained in the October 1968 issue of the Canadian Journal of Corrections ); led them into what he named the Total Encounter Capsule, a small room painted bright green; and asked them to remove their clothes. This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world’s first-ever marathon nude psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths.
Elliott’s raw, naked, LSD-fueled sessions lasted for epic eleven-day stretches. The psychopaths spent every waking moment journeying to their darkest corners in an attempt to get better. There were no distractions—no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least one hundred hours every week) of their feelings. When they got hungry, they sucked food through straws that protruded through the walls. The patients were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for one another even if they were, in the words of an internal Oak Ridge report of the time, “in a state of arousal while doing so.”
Ronson’s book is unfortunately scattershot and unfocused, mostly good for anecdotal pointers. Richard Weisman wrote a far more detailed reflection on the Oak Ridge experiments. In either version, Barker and Gary Maier and other empathetic psychiatrists display jawdropping irresponsibility..
Granted, this does not seem any worse than what one can read about in Foucault or, more vividly, in the horrific chronicles given by Erving Goffman in his amazing book Asylums and shown by Frederick Wiseman in Titticut Follies. (“Titicut Follies portrays the existence of occupants of Bridgewater, some of them catatonic, holed up in unlit cells, only periodically washed down with a hose and taken out in order to receive force feeding. It also portrays the indifference and bullying on the part of the institution’s staff.”) Humane treatment is a very recent invention and still practiced inconsistently.
If anything, Freud may have helped push forward increasingly humane treatment of the severely mentally ill, as manifested in Barker’s good intentions. But this does not excuse the rampant irresponsibility that was at hand at Oak Ridge, and Barker’s genial enthusiasm (he quotes Buber in “The Hundred-Day Hate-in”!) is in some ways even more frightening than the disdain, malice, and indifference that was historically the rule. The casual certainty that their mental model, derived primarily from psychoanalytic theory, would produce productive results is borne out of the same pool of certainty from which Freud drew capaciously.
Ronson gets one of his most disturbing quotes from one of the Capsule members named Steve Smith:
“I remember Elliott Barker coming into my cell,” Steve told me. “He was charming, soothing. He put his arm around my shoulder. He called me Steve. It was the first time anyone had used my first name in there. He asked me if I thought I was mentally ill. I said I thought I wasn’t. ‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ he said, ‘I think you are a very slick psychopath. I want you to know that there are people just like you in here who have been locked up more than twenty years. But we have a program here that can help you get over your illness.’ So there I was, only eighteen at the time, I’d stolen a car so I wasn’t exactly the criminal of the century, locked in a padded room for eleven days with a bunch of psychopaths, the lot of us high on scopolamine [a type of hallucinogenic] and they were all staring at me.”
I obviously cannot lay the full responsibility for Barker’s behavior or psychoanalysis’s influence on psychopathological treatment at Freud’s feet. Yet I cannot fully excuse it either. Freud’s model of the psyche became instrumentalized as an well-meaning institutional cudgel, and it could only have done so had it claimed such a scientific authority for itself.
Regarding that authority, George Makari (an avowed psychoanalyst himself) writes of the fight between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud’s psychoanalytic factions in England in 1942:
A talented member of Melanie Klein’s group named Donald Winnicott protested that Freud would never have wanted to “limit our search for truth.” He too asked the society to adopt language that put the aim of the group as the furthering of “the psychoanalytical branch of science founded by Freud.”
The Kleinians had taken the high ground of science, despite the fact that their leader had been accused of dramatically departing from basic scientific principles. Like the old Freudians, the Kleinians had become defenders of an empirically unknowable belief regarding unconscious mental life. Nonetheless, the Kleinians draped themselves in the principles of free inquiry. Like others before them, they seemed to want the freedom of scientific pursuit without accepting the responsibilities that came with it.
Up until the time of After Virtue (still a fascinating book), MacIntyre was a fairly keen observer of ethics and social philosophy, as well as an enviably clear writer. I suppose he still is, but since the time of his conversion to Catholicism in the 1980s, his increasing focus on religion and increasingly tendentious positions have had much less to offer me.
But here he is on Freud, speaking like Gellner (but more sympathetically) of how Freud threaded the needle of modernity:
Psychoanalysis need not become the self-enclosed system which it so often is. But how do we avoid this?
Part of the answer is surely obtained by considerting the strain within Freud’s own writings between observation and explanation, between the material he amasses and the theoretical forms into which he cast his presentation of the material. The comparison with Newton misled not only his expositors but Freud himself. What Freud showed us were hitherto unnoticed facts, hitherto unrevealed motives, hitherto unrelated facets of our life. And in doing so his achievement broke all preconceived conceptual schemes–including his own. As a discoverer he perhaps resembles a Prsout or a Tolstoy rather than a Dalton or a Pasteur. We could have learnt this from reading Freud himself; but the division among his heirs also reveals the fact clearly.
Yet both sets of heirs are legitimate. The sterility and perversity are as Freudian as the perceptive fertility of a Bettelheim or an Erikson. Freud, too, was a victim of the need to explain, of the need to be a Newton. The paradox of the history of psychoanalysis is that it is those analysts most intent on presenting their subject as a theoretical science who have transformed it into a religion, those most concerned with actual religious phenomena, such as Bettelheim and Erikson, who have preserved it as science. The achievement of Bettelheim and Erikson has been to extend our subjection to the phenomena themselves. But in so doing they have not diminished but increased its complexity.
Alasdair MacIntyre, “Psychoanalysis: The Future of an Illusion?” in Against the Self-Images of the Age (1971)
Well, this may be too kind to Bettelheim anad even Erikson, but MacIntyre certainly presents the kernel of Freud’s theory of the unconscious in a theoretically compelling fashion, as well as the problems it means to address.
What problems are these? They are problems of self-knowledge, or rather of lack of self-knowledge, of the nature of desire, and of the relationship of both to our actions. One of Freud’s insights, and here he had been anticipated by both Plato and Augustine, was that these problems are inseparable, that there is no adequate solution to any of them that does not involve a solution to the others.
Alasdair MacIntyre, The Unconscious (1958)
His 1958 critique of the unconscious holds up quite well 50 years on. He gives this pithy summation of the lack of explanatory power Freud gives us, as well as the inevitability of that lack of explanatory power in any understanding of the human. (Here he is clearly alluding to the scientific explanation vs. human understanding dichotomy proposed by Dilthey).
My thesis then is that in so far as Freud uses the concept of the unconscious as an explanatory concept, he fails, if not to justify it, at least to make clear its justification. He gives us causal explanations, certainly; but these can and apparently must stand or fall on their own feet without reference to it. He has a legitimate concept of unconscious mental activity, certainly; but this he uses to describe behaviour, not to explain it. This thesis, that Freud’s genius is notable in his descriptive work is not of course original. G. E. Moore has told us how Wittgenstein advanced it in his lectures in 1931–3. But it is important to understand how much of Freud’s work it affects….
But the grounds on which we ought to be dubious of speaking of the collective unconscious are ones which ought to make us dubious about speaking of the unconscious at all, except perhaps as a piece of metaphysics, an attempt at a more-than-scientific unification of concepts.
This suggestion, that in speaking of ‘the’ unconscious, we have left science for metaphysics is one that should not surprise us. At the beginning we saw that the attraction of the concept was that it seemed to promise a general formula by means of which a theoretical unification might be achieved in the study of human behaviour. It is now time to ask whether such a unification is in fact possible. The model for this project is drawn from physics which as the most advanced of the sciences tends also to be taken as the type to which others should approximate. To explain what human beings are and do in terms of a general theory is no doubt in some sense possible: the neurophysiologists will one day give us their full account, which will itself be reducible to a set of chemical and finally of physical explanations.
But will such an account give us what we want? It will state all the necessary conditions of human behaviour, but it will mention nothing of the specifically human. For this we need a different kind of account, the kind of portrayal that the novelist rather than the scientist gives us. In other words to portray the specifically human as human, and not as nervous system plus muscles, or as chain molecules, or as fundamental particles, is not to explain at all. Or at least it is to explain as Proust explains or as Tolstoy explains. Freud was certainly a scientist: but to remember this is to expand one’s conception of science. For his chief virtue resided in his power to see and to write so that we can see too. Or can we? He sowed also this doubt in our minds.
Alasdair MacIntyre, The Unconscious
In short, we are speaking of a metaphor (and of literature in general) far more than we are of a science.
Finishing off the examination of Ernest Gellner and his well-meaning but somewhat pig-headed Enlightenment Fundamentalist Rationalism, we come to his attack on psychoanalysis, The Psychoanlaytic Movement: The Cunning of Unreason. This book was published in 1985, 35 years after Words and Things,his attack on Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy.
Like Words and Things, it is a centaur, half-sociology and half-philosophical critique, and just as ill-tempered. It is a better book than Words and Things, because the game is much bigger. Here, Gellner is going after an intellectual and social movement a million times more successful, and at least several times more dubious.
The attack is successful, but as with Words and Things, the centaur form of the book makes it a mixed success. I will try to separate the threads and pick out the book’s vital core from the sometimes shaky surrounding membrane.
Because it is so much more an inviting sociological target, and because the sociology of psychoanalysis is that much more mixed in with its underlying philosophy (i.e., the patient-therapist relationship), psychoanalysis is in many ways the perfect subject for Gellner, ripe for the sort of attack that ordinary language philosophy didn’t seem to merit.
The danger is his being too obvious or unoriginal. Adolf Grunbaum has carefully critiqued the theoretical work of psychoanalysis, while George Makari’s Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis showed the bizarre evolution and personal flaws of the movement’s leaders. Both are books Gellner would not have bothered to write. Gellner’s task rather is to place a quicker critique of that sort into a larger sociological framework.
Consequently, there is a sense at times that Gellner is struggling to make more out of the material than there is. Having identified the endless flaws of psychoanalytic theory and how they yielded a hegemonic power structure in the psychoanalytic community, Gellner has to walk a line between the dangers of (a) restricting his critique to Freud and his direct scions and thus letting the larger societal trend get away, and (b) extending his critique to psychotherapy in general and thus reducing the theory to mere therapeutic practice in all its myriad forms.
Gellner’s solution is to approach things genealogically. By showing how Freud’s initial paradigm caught fire and appealed to the bourgeois masses, he can indict both Freudian psychoanalytic theory as well as its less-direct consequences today, which are the polluted offspring of a manipulative intellectual charlatan. This is his goal, anyway. Ultimately, the minute particulars of psychoanalytic theory and practice seem to fall away in favor of a sociological exploration of psychotherapy in general, which is still heavily influenced, as are we all, by Freud’s ideas.
In some ways Freud is an easier target than a more obscure thinker like Austin or Ryle because a good chunk of his thinking has been absorbed into the common argot. His tripartite psyche, repression, the unconscious, and assorted other concepts have become ubiquitous cultural abstractions even if they aren’t metaphysical entities. So what’s left over seems even more objectionable because we take the less objectionable stuff for granted.
And yet just as Wittgenstein eluded Gellner’s grasp, Freud dodges Gellner’s shots better than the rest of the psychoanalytic community. This is not because Freud’s theory is so very defensible, but because Gellner is attacking it on grounds on which it has never been seriously judged. By 1985 psychoanalysis was definitely not seen as the sort of science that you’d find in the DSM (however dubious that might be), yet its therapeutic children continued unabated.
The story that George Makari tells in Revolution in Mind is that of psychoanalysis emancipating itself from the empirical sciences and going into pure speculation and mythology, often excessively so. Yet if anything this probably aided in its success. As Gellner says:
A purely hermeneutic psychoanalysis would not sound like science, confer no power, and few men would turn to it in distress; a purely physicalist or biological psychoanalysis would have been too much like a science, and no fun. But the plausible-sounding fusion of both is very different, and most attractive.
Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement
Yet as the “science” is quite loose, it’s rather pointless to attack the ideas for not being scientifically grounded, at least in 1985. It’s akin to criticizing Hegel for misunderstanding Sophocles or, indeed, criticizing Freud for misunderstanding Sophocles. It doesn’t teach us anything about their success.
No matter what ridiculous claims Freud made for his theory being “scientific,” psychoanalysis was never even provisionally held to the sort of rigorous standard to which Wittgenstein held his own thoughts, or else it would have collapsed. The scientific rhetoric was necessary, as Freud well knew, to getting his project off the ground and initially accepted in the medical and psychological community, but it became secondary once success was assured. The interesting story is not psychoanalysis pretending to be a science, but psychotherapy’s underlying Freudian groundwork surviving the debunking of those scientific claims.
As the Freudians are still fond of quoting:
if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, to us he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion
under whom we conduct our different lives . . .
W. H. Auden, In Memory of Sigmund Freud
Freud was an incisively creative mind, which Gellner acknowledges, and in conjunction with his brilliant self-marketing, he managed to gain an astonishing amount of traction for some of his psychological metaphors and models. That his theories were held to be science among several influential groups for quite some time is one depressing measure of his success.
Gellner succeeds, however, when he tries to understand the success rather than attacking the theory.
Two stories emerge, related but distinct. First there is Freud the empire-builder, who keeps reins on psychoanalysis and jealously guards the keys to his process and movement. Freud was indeed autocratic, though not quite the tyrant Gellner makes out. Makari shows Freud as a self-doubting genius (albeit one who is careerist, unethical, narcissistic, and a plagiarist) who had good reason to keep control, as most of his followers are far from his intellectual equal. Of the Freudians, Ferenczi and Melanie Klein acquit themselves without too much damage but do not impress, while Carl Jung and Anna Freud come off very badly indeed.
Makari’s book is far more successful than Gellner’s in showing the poison that went around in these circles, and his lack of a blatant axe to grind allows the twisted process to emerge organically. Gellner is right to see Freud as a demagogue of a sort, but he really can’t be bothered to do the background.
Yet this does not prove fatal to Gellner. The second story, and the one Gellner is more effective in telling, is the large scale story of the success of psychoanalysis and consequently psychotherapy in general. Here Gellner can deal with the received ideas of psychoanalysis in general and try to figure out its place in society.
Somewhat ironically, Gellner must consequently credit Freud with having pulled off something amazing in selling his wares to the public. But what did he sell? A secular mythos and practice.
One way of seeing the ideological achievement of Sigmund Freud is to understand that he has constructed a solid, non-conjectural, support-providing world, something that had disappeared from our life; that he invented a technique for supplying this commodity made-to-measure for individual consumers; and that he had erected it using exclusively modern, intellectually acceptable bricks.
Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement
Freud’s achievement, then, was appealing to a societal neurosis (I use that term ironically) in an instinctive, brilliant way, and offering a solution that was less an idea than a ritual. It is a cutting of the Gordian knot of modernism, of God-is-Deadism, as Gellner points out in a fairly compelling comparison with Nietzsche.
Gellner sometimes puts it as the need for an authority (the therapist), but the better way to put it is the need to find a stable, validated frame narrative for one’s existence. The accomplishment of psychoanalysis is to turn this process not into a one-time fix (which would never work), but into a repeated ritual to shore up the authority.
Again, the irony. By identifying a neurosis that requires ritual treatment, Gellner very nearly excuses the psychoanalytic requirement for potentially unending treatment. He points out a number of problems of modernity which Freudian practice claims to solve, two of which are particularly spot-on:
The Weberian problem of a ‘disenchanted’, cold, impersonal world. The modern world is in fact bound to be such: cognitive growth goes jointly with specialised, single-strand cognitive inquiry, which inevitably separates the intellectual exploration of the world from personal relations, values, and the hierarchical ordering of society. Freud restored a form of cognition which, while articulated in an impeccably modern idiom, and seemingly part of medicine and science, was firmly locked in with a hierarchical and comforting personal relation, and with values and the hope of personal salvation. Thus a reality is reenchanted, and its enchantment is permanently serviced, albeit at a price.
The Durkheimian problem of reuniting cognition, ritual, and social order. Psychoanalysis has or is an astoundingly effective ritual, adapted to an individualist age, engendering all those affective consequences which Durkheim associated with ritual, and indeed separating the sacred and profane with all the neatness which that theory postulated.
To offer a persuasive solution to so fundamental a set of problems, and to offer them in a way that the solution is lived out rather than merely thought, ratified by both ritual and an intense personal relationship, and generally not consciously thought out at all, is an astonishing achievement.
I find this extremely compelling, not least because it seems so obvious after reading it that Freud provided one very dominant mythos of our age. (Others helped out too, as did amorphous cultural processes.) Foucault and others had already been here, but this is the best summation I have read, and a testament to Gellner’s intuitive thinking.
Those philosophers today who ask for a reenchantment of reality to brighten our supposedly cold, industrialized world do not realize that we have already reenchanted our mental frameworks as much as any past culture, albeit in a more tenuous and somewhat neurotic way. But any further reenchantment would require religious dogmatism, so I’m not complaining.
I think Paul Ricoeur’s Freud and Philosophy does a good job of explaining in depth what Freud contributed in this direction. If Freud was a philosopher, he is best thought of as hermeneutic.
Gellner’s statements about the analyst as shaman, the analyst as mystic, the analyst as deity, are interesting and sometimes compelling, but they detract from his more powerful point that the raw practice itself is what’s successful, not the particulars of the relationship. Hence why psychotherapy continues even as classical psychoanalysis has waned.
Core elements of the original framework remain, of course, which is why Freud survives even if psychoanalysis mostly does not. Gellner points out that one key technique is providing a safe space for the externalization of one’s inner demons: that is, treating them as demons, not one’s conscious self.
The flaw of the Freudian Unconscious is not that it constitutes a scandalous inversion of conscious proprieties, but that it remains far, far too close to them. Freudianism is a kind of animism. It projects (rightly or wrongly), on to forces outside our consciousness, the kind of trait or attribute which our culture had habitually attributed to our conscious activity. As in other forms of animism, this is combined with the claim that these spirits of the deep can be understood, conjured up, appeased and rendered harmless only by certain practitioners of mysteries, members of a restrictive guild with specialised initiation rites.
Yet the guild has opened up now, and the process remains, with whatever bits of the theory have been appropriated by the collective societal consciousness. Not surprisingly, most of these do come from Freud himself rather than his less brilliant followers.
Consequently, Gellner’s position is weakened a bit. Because psychoanalysis qua theory proves to be a bit of a red herring (you don’t need the Oedipus Complex and the Death-Instinct for psychotherapy to be successful), the therapist doesn’t come out looking too bad. An expensive luxury? Certainly. A disingenuous practitioner? Perhaps. But having acknowledged the contemporary human’s unstinting desire for a healthier structure/mythos for understanding–or perhaps more accurately, simplifying—one’s own life, Gellner is too quick to assess that the result is unavoidably meaningless.
There is a pragmatic evaluative process, albeit not a terribly scientific one, which is the practical terms of the individual patient’s life. This was the process that slowly killed off psychoanalysis proper. Today, in the absence of a proper theory, evaluations are now performed ad hoc. Such case-by-case evaluations guarantee mixed results at best and gross abuses of power at worst, but psychotherapy is not the self-validating closed system that psychoanalysis-the-theory was. Such systems survive only by opening up, and I think that Freud laid the groundwork for that himself by reversing and revising his positions over the course of his life.
So oddly, Gellner makes the case that psychotherapy was more or less an inevitable coping mechanism that needed to arise given the conditions of modernity. If Freud had not existed, society would have had to invent him. (And, indeed, society did invent its version of him, throwing out the psychosexual and anthropological esoterica it could not use and keeping the basic model and method.) Gellner would like it if we could shrug off those needs and abandon the enchantments that psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic metaphors provide, but since he’s made such a powerful case for why they’re so appealing, it doesn’t seem very likely. Genuine science is never enough. Something always gets piled on top, and frequently it’s called science too.
The grave issue remains that Freud’s absolutist claim to truth for his theory was necessary if psychoanalysis were to gain purchase, so that it could then, under some duress, shrug off its claims to absolute knowledge in favor of a more humble, pragmatic stance and then live on more deftly as psychotherapy. Alas, though, this is the paradox of all of the human “sciences”: we only ever hear about the ones that started with absurd hubris.
(Gellner is the bowling ball. Wittgenstein is the 7-10 split.)
Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things was Gellner’s scathing attack on ordinary language philosophy. It caused a fuss in 1959 and made Gellner’s name after Gilbert Ryle refused to review it and Bertrand Russell angrily defended it. How valid was the critique?
This is not just a historical exegesis, but an object lesson in the hopes that older disputes no longer quite so relevant to us can guide us to principles useful in current debates where we lack the benefit of distance. In short, Gellner is right on sociology and wrong on the philosophy, especially Wittgenstein. But the reasons for that are complicated.
Ordinary language philosophy was the mid-century movement represented nowadays by J.L. Austin and Gilbert Ryle, though it’s telling that Gellner quotes some of the lesser-known lights of that scene to make his most scathing attacks. In addition to Austin and Ryle, he rips on the far more obscure G.J. Warnock and John Wisdom, who do give Gellner some of his juiciest material. I haven’t read either of the latter two, but it seems entirely possible they were strident, less than brilliant exponents of the linguistic turn.
Ryle doesn’t offer up such foolish statements, so Gellner’s critique is broader there: Ryle has drawn the focus away from science and toward trivialities by wanting to analyze the concept of mind rather than mind itself. And Austin is simply a knight-errant whose obsession with the most quotidian of conversational gambits is theological angel-counting.
Gellner has generally kind words for logical positivism and A.J. Ayer and Bertrand Russell, who wrote the preface, again putting him dangerously close to the movement he is attacking. And he ignores perhaps the strongest and most wide-ranging mind to be associated with the movement, P.F. Strawson, as well as Americans like Quine. So it is a bit of a chimera that Gellner is attacking, in that he attributes to a collective a dogma that perhaps even its most strident members didn’t fully adhere to.
One could accuse Gellner of cherry-picking, and I think it’s a fair charge, but I think it’s more enlightening to see that Gellner was criticizing a culture, not a philosophy, one that existed at Oxford in the 1950s and that Gellner experienced first hand. Gellner was a social scientist more than he was a classical philosopher, and his rage is less about ideas per se than about the people who hold them and how they hold him. As an avowed disciple of what he termed Enlightenment Fundamentalist Rationalism, he was guided, more than anything else, by the idea of fallibility and the need for constant doubt:
There are no privileged Sources or Affirmations, and all of them can be queried. In inquiry, all facts and all features are separable: it is always proper to inquire whether combinations could not be other than what had previously been supposed. In other words, the world does not arrive as a package-deal—which is the customary manner in which it appears in traditional cultures—but piecemeal. Strictly speaking, though it arrives as a package-deal, it is dismembered by thought.
Cultures are package-deal worlds; scientific inquiry, by contrast, requires atomization of evidence. No linkages escape scrutiny. Empiricist theory of knowledge claimed that information actually arrives in tiny packages (which is false as a descriptive account); but the lesson learnt was that it should be treated as if it was so broken up. Such breaking up of clusters fosters critical revaluation of world-pictures.
This reexamination of all associations destabilizes all cognitive anciens règimes. Moreover, the laws to which this world is subject are symmetrical. This levels out the world, and thereby ‘disenchants’ it, in the famous Weberian expression. This is the vision. Note again, it desacralizes, disestablishes, disenchants everything substantive: no privileged facts, occasions, individuals, institutions or associations. In other words, no miracles, no divine interventions and conjuring performances and press conferences, no saviours, no sacred churches or sacramental communities. All hypotheses are subject to scrutiny, all facts open to novel interpretations, and all facts subject to symmetrical laws which preclude the miraculous, the sacred occasion, the intrusion of the Other into the Mundane.
But what is perhaps absolutized and made exempt is the method itself. And the method leaves its shadow on the world: it engenders an orderly, symmetrical Nature. The orderliness of inquiry leaves its shadow, and appears as an orderly, unique nature. This is the proper sense which is to be attributed to the Kantian doctrine that we ‘make’ our world: an orderly, systematic, law-bound Nature is really the shadow of our cognitive procedure.
Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion: I Choose You, Bachelorette #2
[Okay, I made up the subtitle.]
What Gellner could not stand were closed systems of thought that were not vulnerable to evidentiary invalidation: religion, Marxism, and psychoanalysis being three popular forms. Behind Gellner’s sociological description of the maneuvers employed by his nemeses lies his true frustration:
There is an undeniable element of truth in Polymorphism, both logically and empirically. As a matter of simple fact it is true that languages are complicated and consist of a variety of activities. It is also, perhaps, a necessary truth that any language that does anything worth while has to contain elements or tools of radically different types, and so cannot be internally entirely homogeneous and simple. Nevertheless, the exaggerated use of Polymorphism * by Linguistic Philosophy is disastrous and unjustifiable. Its weaknesses are similar to those of the three fallacies outlined previously with which it is closely associated. It is an attempt to undermine and paralyse one of the most important kinds of thinking, and one of the main agents of progress, namely intellectual advance through consistency and unification, through the attainment of coherence, the elimination of exceptions, arbitrarinesses, and unnecessary idiosyncracies. It in effect tends to underwrite all current concepts, however useless, anachronistic, inconsistent. For linguistic philosophers conceive their philosophical thought to be the undermining of general models and of models as such, as models-only the actual ungeneral description of an usage is philosophically “aseptic”, and commendable.
*The “57 Varieties” way of doing philosophy, as it has been wittily described by Professor S. Kömer.
Ernest Gellner, Words and Things
He no doubt saw ordinary language philosophy as another, as it “dissolved” one problem after another as linguistic rather than real. This for Gellner is cowardice. Making G.E. Moore into a Chance the Gardener figure, he compares him to Wittgenstein’s ideal:
Some philosophers have considered the deliberate suspension of belief, of the natural attitude, to be of the essence of philosophy. Husserl called it the epoche, a kind of putting-of-the-world-in-brackets and suspending judgment so that one could have a better look.
The essence of Moore is a kind of inverted epoché. He refused to put the world in any brackets.
Moore’s inverted epoché, his conviction or principle that things in general were substantially as they seemed, reappears in Wittgenstein and in Linguistic Philosophy proper with a rationale –namely, that assertions to the effect that things are radically other than they seem are always misuses of language. In brief, Moore displayed many of the characteristics of Linguistic Philosophers, without being led to them by the ways and reasoning of Wittgensteinianism. He did by nature that for which Wittgenstein’s Revelation found reasons.
One might say that G.E. Moore is the one and only known example of Wittgensteinian man: unpuzzled by the world or science, puzzled only by the oddity of the sayings of philosophers, and sensibly reacting to that alleged oddity by very carefully, painstakingly and interminably examining their use of words. . . .The philosophical job is to persuade us of the adequacy of ordinary conceptualisations. It is the story of Plato over again–only this time it is the philosopher’s job to lead us back into the cave.
Ernest Gellner, Words and Things
For Gellner, this “adequacy” is synonymous with complacency and cultural conservatism. I.e., it is the attempt of the Oxford don to keep the world as the comfortable place that it is.
I am a bit sympathetic to this critique, as I suspect the ordinary language orthodoxy of the 1950s genuinely was overbearing and vexing to those upstarts who wished to pursue a less linguistic direction. Yet of course anything can serve as a closed system, if its believers are sufficiently recalcitrant, and any orthodoxy can be and often is overbearing and vexing to upstarts. You don’t need Duhem, Quine, and Kuhn in order to believe that people generally are hesitant to lose faith in the systems to which they have pledged themselves. People are apt to overextend their systems as well. (See C.D. Darlington and, time and again, David Hume and xkcd.)
Nevertheless, Marxism and psychoanalysis, among others, have attracted somewhat more cult-like followings than other systems. It’s probably a good thing Gellner didn’t spend too much time around Heideggerians, otherwise we would have gotten a book on them. Gellner limits himself to a single dismissive remark:
On the side of Continental philosophy, a greater and greater cult of paradox and obscurity, an appetite which feeds on what it consumes and, as with a galloping illness, hardly allows the imagination to conceive its end: who can outdo Heidegger?
Ernest Gellner, Words and Things
The issue is to what extent this cult-like environment is entailed by the system at hand. The criterion that Gellner uses to judge the level of closure of philosophical systems, which I think is a good one, is that of mysticism. At one end is the scientific method by which everything is (supposedly) falsifiable; at the other end is wholly unjustified religion. These two quotes, both of which invoke the phrase “curiously reminiscent,” should give some idea of where ordinary language philosophy stands for Gellner on that spectrum:
The doctrine that philosophy must wither away as we become acquainted with the patterns of our use of words is curiously reminiscent of the Marxist view that the State will wither away.
This main fallacy of Wittgenstein’s which remained with him throughout his life can indeed be expressed more dramatically as the notion that there is such a thing as “seeing the world rightly”. Thus Linguistic Philosophy, the doctrine that philosophy is an activity, is a spiritual exercise that confirms the faith which calls for the exercise to begin with. It is in this respect, as in others, curiously reminiscent of psychoanalysis.
Ernest Gellner, Words and Things
The ultimate bounty of Words and Things is Wittgenstein, whom Gellner would go after in other books as well. There is no question that Wittgenstein is an arch-enemy for Gellner just as much as Russell is a comrade-in-arms. I think Gellner saw Wittgenstein’s abandonment of the semi-reasonable (yet still too mystical) logical atomism of the Tractatus as a betrayal of the human obligations of doubt and secular progress, in effect a turn to religion.
Wittgenstein and his ordinary language followers represent, to Gellner:
The abandonment of serious, relevant issues for conjured, spurious ones.
The unquestioning faith of a mystic and the corresponding influence on blind followers.
These are two different charges, which I’ll call Charge (1) and Charge (2). Gellner co-mingles them but especially with Wittgenstein they need to be separated. My own view is that the first charge is ungrounded but that the second one is at least somewhat legitimate.
As to Charge (1) of spuriousness, Gellner overlooks the internal developments within logical positivism, and the difficulties that Carnap’s Aufbau and other attempts to regiment the world had faced. In fact, he does attack logical atomism as an early example of Wittgenstein’s faith-based reasoning, with Wittgenstein assuming that there are logical simples out there but not needing to go to the trouble of finding any. But Gellner doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge the implications of the failure of logical positivism and verificationism.
In addition, Gellner gets Wittgenstein wrong on a number of points, a problem that persists when he treats Wittgenstein’s later work. This is probably the most damning aspect of the book and the one that still causes people to dismiss it. I can’t defend Gellner here: he felt the need to go after the substance as well as the context, and he couldn’t be bothered to give it a fair shot. To be fair, Wittgenstein is seriously difficult and many of his adherents got him wrong too, and many still aren’t sure if they’re even right; but in general, the closer Gellner gets to Wittgenstein’s philosophy, the less convincing he is.
But in separating language philosophy from all other philosophical problems, Gellner also ignores the more general continuum that was being set up. Language, reality, and logic were not coalescing in the way that was promised, and it was not producing an “orderly, unique nature.” Godel’s blow to systems of logic showing them to be necessarily incomplete was perhaps the most crushing inner defeat, but language itself was refusing to conform as well. In this way Gellner was very similar to Russell, who saw the problems Wittgenstein raised with his Theory of Knowledge, but could not bring himself to reject the general empiricist basis behind them. (See David Pears’ The False Prison for more on this.)
Because syntactic or indeed semantic theories of language haven’t really worked out, and pragmatics have become more and more important, you can call Austin et al. naive, dogmatic, boring, or just plain sloppy, but you can’t quite call them wrong, at least not in the way one would call logical positivism wrong.
The problem is that Gellner’s Enlightenment Fundamentalist Rationalism sets up very strict criteria by which one can make sweeping statements about things like the worthlessness of a school of philosophy, and human languge is such a mess that Gellner’s attempt to hold the fort on reasonably simple, naive theories of meaning cannot clear the bar that his own principles have set for him.
That leaves Gellner other avenue of attack for Charge (1), his objection to Pyrrhonistic and therapeutic attitudes of ordinary language philosophy. I do not see this attack as sufficiently grounded either, as science has offered similar prescriptions. The healing of our “folk psychological” ideas is just one of the more prominent recent examples of “seeing the world rightly.” Hence why Dennett’s Consciousness Explained was dubbed Consciousness Explained Away, Consciousness Ignored, etc. These attitudes may be better grounded scientifically, but the attitudes remain similar.
And Pyrrhonic and therapeutic attitudes are hardly new: Epicurus, Nagarjuna, Sextus Empiricus, Lucretius, and many others have always offered the claim that truth would set us free from at least some of our worries and obsessions. These attitudes, when deployed pathologically, are an offense to knowledge and curiosity, but Gellner simply slams the attitudes in toto without allowing for their inevitable presence in all domains. They can never be stamped out. I’m sure Gellner knew this, but his enthusiasm got the better of him.
Onto Charge (2), of the mythification of Wittgenstein. Everything I have read suggests a strong degree of truth to the veneration and almost deification of Wittgenstein. He had an aura of remote brilliance about him and people speak of attending his classes as they would of attending the speeches of a prophet. I think Gellner is very psychologically keen about Wittgenstein.
This main fallacy of Wittgenstein’s which remained with him throughout his life can indeed be expressed more dramatically as the notion that there is such a thing as “seeing the world rightly.”
Wittgenstein was indeed driven by a need for certainty, for clarity, for indisputable assertions. There is no doubt this was a pathological need, and it informs the less attractive aspects of his philosophy: a general arrogance and an unwillingness to accept, even momentarily, provisional or partial measures in explanations and analyses. Both of these are present in his demand to see the world rightly.
Wittgenstein’s brilliance and integrity prevented him from taking easy solutions, however, and Gellner does not seem to have realized this, presumably because he did not take Wittgenstein’s project seriously. Wittgenstein’s stubbornness and general refusal to accept criticism except from within does not make it any easier, but the fact remains that Wittgenstein could not allow himself to do what he continually said he wanted to do, which is give up philosophy. He wouldn’t stop until he knew he saw the world rightly, and I’m pretty sure he never would have believed he did. Gellner has made an accurate diagnosis but has misstated the symptoms.
Yet Wittgenstein’s personality did engender a more rigid orthodoxy, which was not helped by the stridency of Ryle. Again, however, Gellner goes too far in conflating philosophy and culture. The orthodoxy of computational linguistics was just as strong for many years, yet it did not arise from any particular mysticism of beliefs, just from a remarkably charismatic and brilliant founder.
Wittgenstein was an exceptional case, however, and the combination of his gnomic discourse and his yearning, spiritual frustration was captivating to some and toxic to people like Gellner. (I don’t believe Gellner ever met Wittgenstein, but that he formed an idea of him based on interacting with his acolytes, an idea perhaps even more mythic and titanic than the reality.) It is right to be wary of any such elevation, and it is here that Gellner gets closest to explaining the cultural etiology of the more mediocre language philosophy he is attacking, and the blind faith that does play a part in it.
It’s a curious error to conflate ideas (Charge (1)) and culture (Charge (2)), and particularly curious when a keen social scientist like Gellner makes it. It’s not the only time he did it: The Psychoanalytic Movement: The Cunning of Unreason indicts Freud and his followers on similar grounds, though with far more success. Freud, like Wittgenstein, was a near-demagogic bringer of truth who also suffered from acute self-doubt and revised his own theories repeatedly, while bridling at the slightest criticism from others. In both cases, Gellner ties the figures and their followers too rigidly to the ideas in play, as though there was an exact parallel correspondence between the sociological power dynamics at work and the underlying theories themselves.
It produces a peculiar sort of alienation: people are expressing and asserting themselves through ideological systems and forms of argument rather than through emotional dynamics. My own belief has generall been that this gets it the wrong way round: ideological reconstructions are post hoc justifications for personal and emotional conflicts that owe little (but not nothing) to the intellectual matters at hand. The ideas coyuld have easily been different; the emotions and games of power are so often the same.
Changizi left because despite having tenure, the whole nature of grants is such that they do not allow for work on potentially paradigm-shifting ideas, because they have too great a chance for failure. He cites Vinay Deolalikar’s valiant but seemingly wrong proof that P=NP as an example of the sort of work that can only be done outside academia.
But I don’t think the Changizi incident reflects anything too new about academia. And I think when people talk about the problems in academia today vs the problems forty or fifty years ago, Changizi isn’t running up against anything new. Paradigm-shifting work has never gotten funding except when there was a clear military interest, in which case the floodgates (or cashgates) opened.
So when assessing academia, there are three interlinked but distinct factors here that vary independently by field:
The Finance Factor: The ability to get funding for research in that field from anywhere other than a university.
The Infrastructure Factor: The non-overhead resources (time, money, people, equipment) required for research in the field.
The Prestige Factor: The field’s self-determined metric of success for research (influence, “impact,” prestige).
Literature, psychology, and computer science are affected in different ways by these factors. Even within a field, there are variances, which is why Deolalikar isn’t such a great example.
People like Deolalikar wander between academia and corporate research labs quite a bit, as there’s much closer coordination between them in the computer science world, the profit motive being far more obvious. Even beyond that, Deolalikar’s capital needs are very cheap: a living wage for himself, an office, etc. He didn’t need a “lab.”
Theoretical computer science issues like P=NP are akin to theoretical math, requiring little beyond pen and paper and a brain with very particular capacities.
On the other hand, applied computer science research can be tremendously expensive. So expensive that academia can’t even provide the infrastructure even with funding. If you want to analyze the entirety of the internet or examine database issues with petabytes of data, acquiring and processing meaningful that amount of meaningful data is just not within the reach of a university. This may change in the future with joint efforts, but I suspect that corporations will always have some edge because the financial motive is so present (unlike, say, with supercolliders).
The financial motive is not always so imminently present, even within computer science. For things like neuroscience and psychology, where the profits are clearly possible but harder to predict, grants come into play. If you need a lab and funding for it, there will be politics to getting it, period. Research labs spend thousands of person-hours filling out grant applications in order to convince the pursestring-holders (the government, frequently) that they’re doing the “right” thing.
Where the finance factor is high, things haven’t changed that much, even with increases in bureaucracy. High-cost research will continue to be done within institutions as long as there’s profit in it. It will always be somewhat conservative because people with money want results for their research.
Where the finance factor is low, the infrastructure factor is also frequently low, because there’s nowhere to get money for infrastructure other than the university, and the university is unlikely to fund much that can’t be funded by other sources.
The exception is if the prestige factor is high. If the top people in a field have a huge impact on the world around them, then the university will invest money simply because it will draw attention and (indirectly) more money to the university. Economists, political scientists, and even (in Europe) anthropologists and philosophers: they frequently possess enough prestige outside of academia that they will continue to draw people and money because they are part of the larger society. Jurgen Habermas and Michael Ignatieff, for example. And success in these fields is partly measured by that sort of outside prestige. How could it not be?
So where things have changed are in fields which lack external sources of funding and lack external prestige. Fields meeting these criteria:
Funding Factor: Low
Infrastructure Factor: Low
Prestige Factor: Low
These are fields in which the measurement of a researcher’s success is determined near-exclusively by people within the field, and the researchers, even the top ones, have little pull outside of academia. Many of the traditional humanities meet these criteria today.
And these fields are in trouble in a way they were not fifty years ago, where they seemed to comfortably sustain themselves. But today, we see the demand for “impact” in the British university system:
Henceforth a significant part of the assessment of a researcher’s worth – and funding – will be decided according to the impact on society that his or her work is seen to have. The problem is that impact remains poorly defined; it isn’t clear how it will be measured, and the weighting given to it in the overall assessment has been plucked out of the air. It is a bad policy: it will damage research in the sciences and corrupt it in the humanities, as academics will have a strong financial incentive to become liars.
If no one really knows what impact is, it is at least clear what it isn’t: scholarship is seen as of no significance. What the government and Hefce are interested in is work that is useful, in a crudely defined way, for business or policy-making. The effect of impact will be to force researchers to focus even more than they do already on research that pays off – or can be made to appear as if it does – within the assessment cycle, rather than on fundamental work whose significance might take years, even decades, to be appreciated.
This is a problem for the sciences as well, as it corporatizes the grant process and makes immediate results far more necessary. But it is a far, far greater problem for some of the humanities, which don’t really traffic in “results” of this sort. But when put it this way, it doesn’t exactly seem surprising. Isn’t the better question why this sort of reckoning hasn’t happened until now?
The changing economic situation is obviously a factor, but there’s a social one as well. The prestige factor used to be higher. The connections between the academic humanities and the rest of the world used to be stronger. But through some process, and I think that it is not a trivial or obvious one, some of the humanities turned hermetically inward and/or the world started ignoring them, and so their prestige diminished.
Fifty years ago, there were scholarly books put out by major presses (Harper, Penguin) that no non-academic publisher would touch today. Was there an audience for them outside of academia? I don’t have a strong sense. There certainly isn’t now. Pears is a bit too specific: money and politics are certainly high-prestige forms of impact, but what impact really seems to mean is any perceived societal value outside of academia.
Low-cost research will always continue to be done by enthusiasts. Michael Ventris made huge steps in deciphering Linear B, despite being a low-level architect with no credentials. But the “impact” business seems to be at trailing indicator rather than a leading one, signifying that the more disconnected humanities have been living on borrowed time for quite a while. And I don’t see how that will reverse without a larger shift in the relation of those fields to society at large.
